Introduction: Spark Joy

Your work should spark joy#

You should get very good at adding sparks of joy to your work.

This may seem like a strange principle to have in a course about coding careers. However, it can add so much value and impact to your work, disproportionate to the amount of effort spent, that it had to be included.

Marie Kondo’s 2019 Netflix series#

Marie Kondo’s 2019 Netflix series swept the zeitgeist with the idea that we should declutter by getting rid of everything that doesn’t tokimeku, which translates to “Spark Joy.”

While we are used to this idea from the perspective of the consumer, the principle cuts equally the other way as well. We live in an age of abundance, which is also an age of noise. We creators, producers, and developers should all think about how to make our work “spark joy,” lest it is Marie Kondo -ed away like everything else.

What is sparking joy?#

“Spark joy” is hard to define because it is as precise as the human emotion of “joy.” However, in embracing that vagueness, we understand that people are primarily not rational— not in what we are drawn to, what we decide to use, nor what we choose to talk about. We might have perfectly good rationalizations of why we like something, but often the real reason can be deep in the subconscious.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

- Maya Angelou